Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
. In this case
FUD had been crossed out with an emphatic red X; FUD was an unholy
trinity. That team, the vanquishers of FUD, won the contest.
Disdain for FUD—and for the type of person who tends to experience
it—is what helped cause the crash, says Boykin Curry, a managing
director of the investment firm Eagle Capital, who had front-row seats to
the 2008 meltdown. Too much power was concentrated in the hands of
aggressive risk-takers. “For twenty years, the DNA of nearly every
financial institution … morphed dangerously,” he told 
Newsweek
magazine at the height of the crash. “Each time someone at the table
pressed for more leverage and more risk, the next few years proved them
‘right.’ These people were emboldened, they were promoted and they
gained control of ever more capital. Meanwhile, anyone in power who
hesitated, who argued for caution, was proved ‘wrong.’ The cautious
types were increasingly intimidated, passed over for promotion. They
lost their hold on capital. This happened every day in almost every
financial institution, over and over, until we ended up with a very
specific kind of person running things.”
Curry is a Harvard Business School grad and, with his wife, Celerie
Kemble, a Palm Beach–born designer, a prominent fixture on New York
political and social scenes. Which is to say that he would seem to be a
card-carrying member of what he calls the “go-go aggressive” crowd,

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and an unlikely advocate for the importance of introverts. But one thing
he’s not shy about is his thesis that it was forceful extroverts who caused
the global financial crash.
“People with certain personality types got control of capital and
institutions and power,” Curry told me. “And people who are
congenitally more cautious and introverted and statistical in their
thinking became discredited and pushed aside.”
Vincent Kaminski, a Rice University business school professor who
once served as managing director of research for Enron, the company
that famously filed for bankruptcy in 2001 as a result of reckless
business practices, told the 
Washington Post
a similar story of a business
culture in which aggressive risk-takers enjoyed too high a status relative
to cautious introverts. Kaminski, a soft-spoken and careful man, was one
of the few heroes of the Enron scandal. He repeatedly tried to sound the
alarm with senior management that the company had entered into
business deals risky enough to threaten its survival. When the top brass
wouldn’t listen, he refused to sign off on these dangerous transactions
and ordered his team not to work on them. The company stripped him of
his power to review company-wide deals.
“There have been some complaints, Vince, that you’re not helping
people to do transactions,” the president of Enron told him, according to
Conspiracy of Fools
, a book about the Enron scandal. “Instead, you’re
spending all your time acting like cops. We don’t need cops, Vince.”
But they did need them, and still do. When the credit crisis threatened
the viability of some of Wall Street’s biggest banks in 2007, Kaminski
saw the same thing happening all over again. “Let’s just say that all the
demons of Enron have not been exorcised,” he told the 
Post
in November
of that year. The problem, he explained, was not only that many had
failed to understand the risks the banks were taking. It was also that
those who 
did
understand were consistently ignored—in part because
they had the wrong personality style: “Many times I have been sitting
across the table from an energy trader and I would say, ‘Your portfolio
will implode if this specific situation happens.’ And the trader would
start yelling at me and telling me I’m an idiot, that such a situation
would never happen. The problem is that, on one side, you have a
rainmaker who is making lots of money for the company and is treated
like a superstar, and on the other side you have an introverted nerd. So

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who do you think wins?”
But what exactly is the mechanism by which buzz clouds good
judgment? How did Janice Dorn’s client, Alan, dismiss the danger signs
screaming that he might lose 70 percent of his life savings? What
prompts some people to act as if FUD doesn’t exist?
One answer comes from an intriguing line of research conducted by
the University of Wisconsin psychologist Joseph Newman. Imagine that
you’ve been invited to Newman’s lab to participate in one of his studies.
You’re there to play a game: the more points you get, the more money
you win. Twelve different numbers flash across a computer screen, one
at a time, in no particular order. You’re given a button, as if you were a
game-show contestant, which you can press or not as each number
appears. If you press the button for a “good” number, you win points; if
you press for a “bad” number, you lose points; and if you don’t press at
all, nothing happens. Through trial and error you learn that four is a
nice number and nine is not. So the next time the number nine flashes
across your screen, you know not to press that button.
Except that sometimes people press the button for the bad numbers,
even when they should know better. Extroverts, especially highly
impulsive extroverts, are more likely than introverts to make this
mistake. Why? Well, in the words of psychologists John Brebner and
Chris Cooper, who have shown that extroverts think less and act faster
on such tasks: introverts are “geared to inspect” and extroverts “geared
to respond.”
But the more interesting aspect of this puzzling behavior is not what
the extroverts do